Then the lust of battle seized him, blind fury filled his breast, and he thought only of revenge. He forgot his age, forgot that his fighting days should have been long over, forgot everything but the mad desire to clutch the throats of his foes and to choke the life out of them. So, tearing down the barricades of his door, he rushed out on his enemies like a wild bull charging. But alas for Ringan! part of the discarded barricade caught his foot as he burst over the threshold, and down he came with a crash. Before he could struggle even to his knees, the enemy was on him, and he was down again on his face, half a dozen men swarming over him. Even yet, however, old and hopelessly outnumbered as he was, the fight for a time was not so very unequal, and he might in the end have cast off the crowd that strove to hold and bind him. {141}An ill day it would have been for some of them had he succeeded. But a treacherous pedlar, who had joined the fray for the sake of hire, watching his chance, came behind, and with a blow from a hammer smashed Ringan's jaw and brought him to the ground, stunned. The old man was taken then, bound hand and foot, and carted off to Edinburgh. There, in the foul air of the Tolbooth he lay for eight weary years, suffering tortures great part of the time, not only from the broken jaw, but from old wounds which had broken out afresh, and which from the insanitary condition of the prison now refused to heal. It was a broken, frail old man who came out from that long imprisonment. And he never got back to his beloved Jed. Ringan Oliver died in Edinburgh in 1736; his huge frame sleeps in Greyfriars Churchyard. As one travels up Jed by the old coach road--whose windings do not invariably desert even the abruptest elbow of the stream--road and river finally part company at the bridge below Camptown. Here the latter's course swings gradually to the right, through leafy banks and under spreading trees, whilst the former, following a straighter route, enters on a long, steady bit of collar-work up the side of a pine-clad brae where, on one hand, lies the old camp from which the adjacent little settlement derives its name, and, on the other, Edgerston, sleeping in its woods. Here once stood Edgerston Castle, which Hertford's men took "by pollicie" in 1544;--someone sold the Rutherfurd of that day. Castle and lands then belonged to the Rutherfurds, one of the most ancient families in Scotland, and still the lands are theirs.